CRIME

Toughing it out

Astonishingly, Labour has turned law and order into home turf

CONTESTING law and order with the Conservative Party used to be unwise. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, the Tories were so far ahead on the issue—up to 39 points, according to MORI, a pollster—that the mere mention of crime was political suicide for any other party. But the two biggest political outfits enter this election campaign roughly tied on the matter. That alone is a remarkable achievement for left-of-centre Labour. And the present regime might take comfort from something else. The man in charge of home affairs when the Tories lost popular support over the issue is the present Conservative leader, Michael Howard.

Whether the forces of law and order are winning or losing will be much debated in the next few weeks. But what is it they are trying to achieve, exactly? Sir Ian Blair, head of London's Metropolitan Police, compares the task to a medieval triptych. In the large central panel is what the police call “volume crime”—burglary, car theft, mugging and so on—which takes up the great majority of coppers' time. This is what most people have in mind when they talk about crime, and from the 1960s until very recently it was the focus of government crime-fighting efforts. It is relatively easy to count, hence easy to know how the campaign is going.

During Labour's second term, though, more attention has been devoted to the triptych's two side panels. The first of these is anti-social behaviour, which consists of upsetting but not necessarily illegal things like spitting, public drunkenness, petty vandalism and prostitution. This is harder to quantify, since behaviour that outrages decent citizens in one place will seem normal in another. The third panel consists of weighty crimes such as human trafficking and gun murders, which are so terrifying as to render counts meaningless: if there are any at all, there are too many.

How are the forces of law and order doing against this triple menace? When it comes to the common, measurable stuff, not badly. Burglary and car crime halved in the past eight years, according to the British Crime Survey. The number of muggings rose in Labour's first term but fell in its second. Attacks on strangers have actually increased.

The reasons for that may be the same as the causes of falling acquisitive crime. A tightening job market has reduced the appeal of burglary and car theft while providing young working-class men with more cash to spend on inducements to violence—ie, alcohol. If people are less likely to be relieved of their honest earnings on the way to the pub, they are more likely to get into a fight once they are there.

Economic growth has probably done more to reduce crime than the police ever could, but the coppers (and the government) can claim some credit. The discipline of audit and accountability, which has been applied so clumsily and counter-productively to things like higher education, seems to have made the police more productive. Targets for answering phone calls and reducing crime rates have been set up and hit. The police don't like the new approach, which strikes them as bureaucratic, but they are proud of the results. They also like the fact that money and extra policemen come along with greater scrutiny. Since the last election, in 2001, officer numbers have swelled by 16,500, bringing the total up to 140,000.

More impressive, at least from a political point of view, has been Labour's drive against anti-social behaviour. For years, MPs in urban areas had endured constituents' complaints about “neighbours from hell”. The police, who were busy pursuing burglars and car thieves, did little to stop it; local councils were no better.

The government concluded that the best way to tackle such problems was through civil, not criminal law. Rather than outlawing minor misdeeds, it created civil orders that could be tailored to individual troublemakers. The most powerful of the new tools is the anti-social behaviour order, or ASBO, which can be used to severely restrict the conduct, movements or even the speech of anyone over the age of ten. Obtaining an ASBO is easy, since standards of proof are set deliberately low (hearsay evidence is admissible in court, for example). But anyone who breaks the terms of their order may be imprisoned for up to three years.

An easier way to bang 'em up

There is plenty of evidence that ASBOs have been misused. Among the recipients have been mothers who argue with their children, a man who alarmed neighbours by dancing with his Christmas tree and a woman who tried to commit suicide. Many ASBOs have been dished out to serious criminals who the police were having a hard time putting away. From their point of view, the appeal of the new orders is obvious. Not only is it easier to convict someone for entering a forbidden street than it is to convict them of burglary; the sentence is likely to be stiffer, too.

ASBO recipients include mothers who argue with their children and a woman who tried to kill herself

Few seem to object to the new powers, though. The campaign against anti-social behaviour has proved enormously popular among MPs and the general public. Key to its success has been support from local newspapers, which approve of ASBOs in part because they are not subject to reporting restrictions. As the war on incivility has heated up, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have wilted. The Lib Dems began by opposing ASBOs, but pressure from local activists forced them to reconsider; the party now wants tough measures combined with support and advice for problem families. The Conservatives have simply pointed out that fewer ASBOs have been handed out than the government wanted.

Labour's war on organised crime has been less clamorous, in part because there have been few victories to shout about. Illicit drug trafficking is rampant, to judge by falling street prices. Recorded gun crimes have risen every year since 1997. To tackle these enormities, the government has rolled previously separate (and occasionally warring) crime-fighting outfits into a single Serious Organised Crime Agency, which awaits legislative approval. Labour also claims that identity cards, which it wants to make compulsory within ten years, will make life harder for people-smugglers and fraudsters. The Conservatives broadly agree, which leaves the Liberal Democrats alone in opposing the encroachments of the state. The party opposes identity cards and advocates a more liberal approach to illegal drugs.

Back to basics

All this has given Labour a reputation for toughness. But it may not be enough. Although people feel the government has crime in hand (or, at least, that something is being done about it) they are not satisfied with the way the police operate. Officers are viewed as too remote, too disinterested and too bound by bureaucracy. These days, the perennial complaint that “there aren't enough bobbies on the beat” probably refers not just to a shortage of officers on the streets but also to a lack of control over what they do. In 2003-04, 59% of people who reported a crime were happy with the way it was dealt with. That is down from 68% ten years earlier. Not surprisingly, all the major political parties go into the election promising that people will be given more say over how crime is tackled in their neighbourhoods.

The Conservatives' proposals are the most radical. They want to abolish police authorities—committees of politicians and local worthies that currently scrutinise regional forces. Elected commissioners will harry chief constables instead. The Tories also promise to abolish police targets and bureaucracy, especially the paperwork that has grown up around race relations. They believe that the police should be able to stop and search people on the street (powers that have, in the past, provokedriots) without pausing to fill in a complicated form.

The Liberal Democrats also want a bonfire of paperwork, the better to free up time for beat policing. They argue for replacing centralised control over the police with contracts spelling out what people can expect of local coppers. But they do not want the elected commissioners the Tories propose: they believe the police should be scrutinised by local councillors.

Labour wants more officers assigned to specific neighbourhoods, and more Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs)—uniformed civilians who spend much of their time on the streets. It has floated the idea that everybody should be given the mobile phone number of their local copper and has made it easier for people to trigger inspections of their police force. But the government does not want to relinquish its grip over policing, which has, if anything, tightened recently. In 2004, the chief constable of Humberside Police was criticised in an inquiry into the murders of two girls. David Blunkett, then the home secretary, demanded his resignation—and, when it wasn't immediately forthcoming, produced statistics showing that the force was under-performing. Despite local support, the police chief retired early.

The three main parties agree more on how to catch criminals than they do on what to do with them once caught. Quietly, and belying its reputation for toughness, Labour has moved towards a more liberal approach to criminal rehabilitation. Commit a crime in Britain today and you are more likely to be sentenced to drug treatment or community work than was the case a few years ago. Teenage criminals are now subject to “restorative justice”, which means, in some cases, apologies to victims; the same methods are being tested on older offenders. Partly as a result, the prison population appears to be holding steady after five years of increases.

The Liberal Democrats want to move more quickly in the same direction by forcing offenders to recompense the communities they have harmed. The Conservatives are having none of it. When Michael Howard was home secretary in the 1990s, the number of prisoners increased by 37%, to over 60,000. Mr Howard believes this was crucial in the fight against crime, and promises to repeat his earlier performance by increasing the prison estate from its current capacity of 78,000 to 100,000. Those extra beds would soon be filled: the Tories want stiffer sentencing and an end to the scheme under which some convicts are let out before the end of their sentence.

In one sense, it matters little which policies are implemented. In no year since 1992, when the British Crime Survey first included the question, has a majority of people believed that crime has fallen or even remained the same. For politicians, winning the fight over law and order means convincing the public that the tide will rise more slowly if they are elected.